Fiction. I HAVE BLINDED MYSELF WRITING THIS was written by a woman with an affliction: her body needs her memories to clot her cuts, to heal means to lose parts of her past. It is a collection of the blueprints, lists, and photographs of memory meant to be private. It a book written for you. It is a question: as we lose our memories, do we become fragments of ourselves? It is a plea: participate with me in the remembering and the destruction of memory.
Praised as "brilliantly revelatory...a masterful work of critical journalism" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), The Holy or the Broken is the fascinating account of one of the most-performed rock songs in history--Leonard Cohen's heartrending "Hallelujah." How did one obscure song become an international anthem for human triumph and tragedy, a song each successive generation seems to feel they have discovered and claimed as uniquely their own? Celebrated music journalist Alan Light follows the improbable journey of "Hallelujah" straight to the heart of popular culture.
Whose truth is the lie? Stay up all night reading the sensational psychological thriller that has readers obsessed, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Too Late and It Ends With Us. #1 New York Times Bestseller · USA Today Bestseller · Globe and Mail Bestseller · Publishers Weekly Bestseller Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish. Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity’s notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn’t expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of the night her family was forever altered. Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents could devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen’s feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife’s words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue loving her.
What are the keys to success in life? Simply trying hard and having great goals are not enough, says veteran corporate trainer Steve White. "Our best intentions can become our worst enemy when we are blind to why they are not working." White learned this the hard way. As a teen he vowed he'd avoid his parents' mistakes and become the best husband and father. But he failed to see that his efforts to control people and circumstances only condemned him to cycles of anger, misunderstandings, judgment and life failure. Surrounded by the pieces of his broken dreams, he opened himself to learn how God wanted to work through even these things for good. In this collection of personal stories and reflections, White shows how--if we believe and remember how deeply we are loved by God and what He wants for our lives--deep personal change to the good is truly experienced. Our new life in Him can then touch the people around us.
Ranging from 1861 to the present day, an anthology of works by many of Chicago's leading black writers includes poetry, fiction, drama, essays, journalism, and historical and social commentary.
The forlornly funny stories in And Also Sharks celebrate the socially awkward, the insecure, the unfulfilled, and the obsessed. A disgruntled follower of a self-esteem blog posts a rambling critical comment. On the hunt for the perfect coffee table, a pregnant woman and her husband stop to visit his terminally ill ex-wife. The office cat lady reluctantly joins her fellow employees' crusade to cheer up their dying co-worker. A man grieving his wife's miscarriages follows his deluded friend on a stealth photo-taking mission at the auto show. A shoplifter creates her own narrative with stolen anecdotes and a kidnapped baby. In this collection, society's misfits and losers are portrayed sympathetically, and sometimes even heroically. As desperately as these characters long to fit in, they also take pride in what sets them apart.
Fourteen-year-old Natalie O'Reilly's world is turned upside down with the news that she will soon go blind. As if this weren't shocking enough, she is forced to face the fact that she must now attend a school for the blind to learn Braille and how to use a cane. As Natalie tackles the skills that will help her to survive in a sighted world, she inwardly hopes for a miracle that will save her sight. But will that miracle come, or will she need to learn to embrace her new life?
In the fourth novel of New York Times bestselling author Mary Balogh's Survivors' Club series, Flavian, Viscount Ponsonby, finds salvation in the love of a most unsuspecting woman... Flavian was devastated by his fiancée’s desertion after his return home from the Napoleonic Wars. Now the woman who broke his heart is back—and everyone is eager to revive their engagement. Except Flavian, who, in a panic, runs straight into the arms of a most sensible yet enchanting young woman. Agnes Keeping has never been in love—and never wishes to be. But then she meets the charismatic Flavian, and suddenly Agnes falls so foolishly and so deeply that she agrees to his impetuous proposal of marriage. When Agnes discovers that the proposal is only to avenge his former love, she’s determined to flee. But Flavian has no intention of letting his new bride go, especially now that he too has fallen so passionately and so unexpectedly in love.
"If readers of Sara Tanderup Linkis’ "Something to hold on to ..." open the book in the expectation of entering a niche of literature and literary studies, they will leave it after having encountered a new highway in literature. Here, the traditional theme of memory and the most recent use of digital media merge into a new understanding of the role of the book in the contemporary media landscape and of vicissitudes of memorial processes literature, which also offers a broader perspective on literature in human history. Spurred by Sara Tanderup Linkis’ sharp eye the readings of texts are lucid, engaging and offers so many ideas that teachers will renew their curricula, and readers will open the internet for more or rush to the library." — Svend Erik Larsen, professor emeritus Memory, Intermediality, and Literature investigates how selected literary works use intermedial strategies to represent and perform cultural memory. Drawing on the theoretical perspectives of cultural memory studies, this engaging, reader-friendly monograph examines new materialism and intermediality studies, analyzying works by Alexander Kluge, W.G. Sebald, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anne Carson, Mette Hegnhøj, William Joyce, J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. The works emerge out of different traditions and genres, ranging from neo-avant-garde montages through photo-novels and book objects to apps and children’s stories. In this new monograph, Sara Tanderup Linkis presents an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, reading the works together, across genres and decades, and combining the perspectives of memory studies and materialist and media-oriented analysis. This approach makes it possible to argue that the works not only use intermedial strategies to represent memory, but also to remember literature, reflecting on the changing status and function of literature as a mediator of cultural memory in the age of new media. Thus, the works may be read as reactions to modern media culture, suggesting the ways in which literature and memory are affected by new media and technologies – photography and television as well as iPads and social media.
Literature has never looked weirder--full of images, colors, gadgets, and footnotes, and violating established norms of character, plot, and narrative structure. Yet over the last 30 years, critics have coined more than 20 new “realisms” in their attempts to describe it. What makes this decidedly unorthodox literature “realistic”? And if it is, then what does “realism” mean anymore? Examining literature by dozens of writers, and over a century of theory and criticism about realism, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism sorts through the current critical confusion to illustrate how our ideas about what is real and how best to depict it have changed dramatically, especially in recent years. Along the way, Mary K. Holland guides the reader on a lively tour through the landscape of contemporary literary studies--taking in metafiction, ideology, posthumanism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism--with forays into quantum mechanics, new materialism, and Buddhism as well, to give us entirely new ways of viewing how humans use language to make sense of--and to make--the world.
